How to Optimize Your Blog for Google

March 25, 2018

Joe: Welcome to the Being Found Show. We are here to help you become found by more buying customers. I came across a marketing group who specializes in the big monsters like Amazon and eBay, and they used a term that I liked, ‘A, B, or fast.’

This term relates to putting your content and your products on sites like Amazon and eBay. Even if you have tried to sell your vehicle on Craigslist, you will understand. When the time comes to post your product, you have to think about what you are putting for the title and what information you need. Now imagine taking 1,000+ products and creating titles and descriptions for each. It could become so overwhelming that you decide not to post your products on Amazon or eBay to sell. I can personally vouch for this pain because I am the founder of a couple of companies that have taken off to sell on those platforms and it is a big task.

Now A, B, or Fast means that when they go to put these products up online, they are going to do so fast just to simply get the content out there, wherever it is at in the process. Don’t have paralysis by over-analysis. Then what they do is from there, they start to analyze what’s happening with those products. They decide if they’re going to upgrade individual products content to ‘B’ level content, which might be a little bit more refined, still generic. Then, if they think that it’s really important, these products sell, or they see that they have an opportunity, they change that content to ‘A’ level content. If you are a business with the intent to sell on these monster sites and you have 5,000 products, and even 20 can be overwhelming if you own your own business, you might adopt ‘A, B, or fast.’

Another reason I liked this was because it is another way of describing what I call ‘limited risk marketing’. That means to spend a limited amount of time and effort until you are sure something is working for you and your business.

A common fear is that if they put something on the internet that isn’t exactly perfect, everyone will see it and they are going to be shamed forever. There are millions and millions of products on Amazon and eBay, and if you don’t have your content good enough to be found, it’s not going to be found anyways. Start by getting your content on there and then take the time to refine what is working.

Our two-minute tip: when it comes to putting your products on monster sites like Amazon and eBay or even on your own website, realize that you’ve got three different types of content you put on: ‘A’ level, ‘B’ level, and fast.

Chauncey: It’s extra good if you’re dealing with things like eBay and Amazon because for one it’s not your website. So putting up lower quality content is not that big of a deal, or as big of a deal as on your site. It’s extra effective because you’re going to websites that are used to target this and especially if you’re selling products. Those filters on Amazon, low to high, high to low, most relevant and so on will benefit you because even if you have terrible content, you may have the lowest price and you are still going to pick up a percentage.

Joe: I am glad you brought that up. You need to get in the game and then work your way to the top. If you initially have time to make every product presentable, go ahead and do that, but doing it fast and getting it done is better than having nothing at all. You are at least being found where you can be as opposed to not at all.

Chauncey: On an SEO content level, Google like to see you and find your pages. They like to see your content go up and the changes and improvement that you make along the way. They like to see you coming along and making it better, making updates, refreshing your content, making it relevant. So if you get it through ‘Fast’ and three months later you go to ‘B,’ and another three months later you’d go to ‘A’ level content, Google’s going to see a regular involvement in your website. Now I realize a lot of what we’re talking about is geared towards third-party websites like Amazon and eBay, but even on your website, this isn’t a bad place to start.

Joe: I want to jump into another article quick because this goes right into it. In Google’s latest Q&A video, John Mueller answers a question from a site owner concerned about their site not being crawled often enough. Google’s John Mueller Reveals how often a site is re-indexed in search.

“How often does Google re-index a website? It seems like it’s much less often than it used to be. We add or remove pages from our site, and it’s weeks before those changes are reflected in Google Search.” Mueller explains that it takes time to crawl entire websites. If Googlebot were to crawl a whole site in a short period of time it would cause unnecessary strain on the server. For that reason, Googlebot has a strict limit on the number of pages it can crawl every day (exact number was not mentioned).

Since Googlebot can only crawl a certain amount of pages, it gives priority to pages that should be crawled more frequently. The most “important” pages, according to Google, are the home page and high-level category pages. Those pages will be crawled most often, so changes will be reflected in Google search faster than, say, an old blog post.

Googlebot will re-crawl important pages at least every few days, and even more frequently in some cases. Mueller did not mention how often other types of pages are crawled. Given this information, it would be fair to say patience is key when waiting for changes on other pages to be reflected in Google Search.”

Joe: If we’re going to talk about your website and getting your content in there, there is still something that you can do. If you have 20 products and old blog posts that you think have been refined and optimized to the best of your abilities, you can always make them better. Keep refining and adjusting and adding to your higher level pages, your category page, and your homepage because it turns out google gives them more priority. What does that mean to businesses, Chauncey?

Chauncey: What businesses should probably take away from this is for those of you who are sitting around thinking that you can’t set aside that eight hours to get something done online, Google is telling you right here is that 15 minutes a day is probably more effective.

When it comes to creating content, getting it out there, sharing it and so on and so forth, they’re showing a regular involvement. It’s almost like a social media kind of aspect where you’re involved throughout your life as opposed to setting everything aside to get it all done in a day and not hit it again for months.

The other thing that is saying is blogging is obviously not dead because pages don’t show up in categories, only blog posts do. It’s that category page where you’re updating your blog posts with the information about your products. That’s a page that you would pay close attention to and make sure it’s being updated because Google apparently is coming back to it.

Thank you for listening to this segment of the Being Found Show, to hear the full show listen here: Being Found Show Episode #47 or subscribe to our podcast.

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The internet has changed marketing and sales forever! I’m here to make sense of this chaos. I want companies to feel confident in their marketing. To be confident, businesses have to know what has changed, what has stayed the same, and what they can do about it.